I would rather eat one of Barney’s dirty nappies, he thought. ‘Not yet,’ he said.

‘You are a worry to us,’ said Christine.

‘I’m OK as I am, thanks.’

‘Maybe,’ said Christine smugly. These two were beginning to make him feel physically ill. It was bad enough that they had children in the first place; why did they wish to compound the original error by encouraging their friends to do the same? For some years now Will had been convinced that it was possible to get through life without having to make yourself unhappy in the way that John and Christine were making themselves unhappy (and he was sure they were unhappy, even if they had achieved some peculiar, brain-washed state that prevented them from recognizing their own unhappiness). You needed money, sure—the only reason for having children, as far as Will could see, was so they could look after you when you were old and useless and skint—but he had money, which meant that he could avoid the clutter and the toilet-paper throws and the pathetic need to convince friends that they should be as miserable as you are.

John and Christine used to be OK, really. When Will had been going out with Jessica, the four of them used to go clubbing a couple of times a week. Jessica and Will split up when Jessica wanted to exchange the froth and frivolity for something more solid; Will had missed her, temporarily, but he would have missed the clubbing more. (He still saw her, sometimes, for a lunchtime pizza, and she would show him pictures of her children, and tell him he was wasting his life, and he didn’t know what it was like, and he would tell her how lucky he was he didn’t know what it was like, and she would tell him he couldn’t handle it anyway, and he would tell her he had no intention of finding out one way or the other; then they would sit in silence and glare at each other.) Now John and Christine had taken the Jessica route to oblivion, he had no use for them whatsoever. He didn’t want to meet Imogen, or know how Barney was, and he didn’t want to hear about Christine’s tiredness, and there wasn’t anything else to them any more. He wouldn’t be bothering with them again.

‘We were wondering,’ said John, ‘whether you’d like to be Imogen’s godfather?’ The two of them sat there with an expectant smile on their faces, as if he were about to leap to his feet, burst into tears and wrestle them to the carpet in a euphoric embrace. Will laughed nervously.

‘Godfather? Church and things? Birthday presents? Adoption if you’re killed in an air crash?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘We’ve always thought you have hidden depths,’ said John.

‘Ah, but you see I haven’t. I really am this shallow.’

They were still smiling. They weren’t getting it.

‘Listen. I’m touched that you asked. But I can’t think of anything worse. Seriously. It’s just not my sort of thing.’

He didn’t stay much longer.

A couple of weeks later Will met Angie and became a temporary stepfather for the first time. Maybe if he had swallowed his pride and his hatred of children and the family and domesticity and monogamy and early nights, he could have saved himself an awful lot of trouble.

Three

During the night after his first day Marcus woke up every half-hour or so. He could tell from the luminous hands of his dinosaur clock: 10.41, 11.19, 11.55, 12.35, 12.55, 1.31… He couldn’t believe he was going to have to go back there the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, and… well, then it would be the weekend, but more or less every morning for the rest of his life, just about. Every time he woke up his first thought was that there must be some kind of way past, or round, or even through, this horrible feeling; whenever he had been upset about anything before, there had usually turned out to be some kind of answer—one that mostly involved telling his mum what was bothering him. But there wasn’t anything she could do this time. She wasn’t going to move him to another school, and even if she did it wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference. He’d still be who he was, and that, it seemed to him, was the basic problem.

He just wasn’t right for schools. Not secondary schools, anyway. That was it. And how could you explain that to anyone? It was OK not to be right for some things (he already knew he wasn’t right for parties, because he was too shy, or for baggy trousers, because his legs were too short), but not being right for school was a big problem. Everyone went to school. There was no way round it. Some kids, he knew, got taught by their parents at home, but his mum couldn’t do that because she went out to work. Unless he paid her to teach him—but she’d told him not long ago that she got three hundred and fifty pounds a week from her job. Three hundred and fifty pounds a week! Where was he going to get that kind of money from? Not from a paper round, he knew that much. The only other kind of person he could think of who didn’t go to school was the Macaulay Culkin kind. They’d had something about him on Saturday-morning TV once, and they said he got taught in a caravan sort of thing by a private tutor. That would be OK, he supposed. Better than OK, because Macaulay Culkin probably got three hundred and fifty pounds a week, maybe even more, which meant that if he were Macaulay Culkin he could pay his mum to teach him. But if being Macaulay Culkin meant being good at drama, then forget it: he was crap at drama, because he hated standing up in front of people. Which was why he hated school. Which was why he wanted to be Macaulay Culkin. Which was why he was never going to be Macaulay Culkin in a thousand years, let alone in the next few days. He was going to have to go to school tomorrow.

All that night he thought like boomerangs fly: an idea would shoot way off into the distance, all the way to a caravan in Hollywood and, for a moment, when he had got as far away from school and reality as it was possible to go, he was reasonably happy; then it would begin the return journey, thump him on the head, and leave him in exactly the place he had started from. And all the time it got nearer and nearer to the morning.

He was quiet at breakfast. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ his mum said as he was eating his cereal, probably because he was looking miserable. He just nodded, and smiled at her; it was an OK thing to say. There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while. The day after his dad left, his mum had taken him to Glastonbury with her friend Corinne and they’d had a brilliant time in a tent. But this was only going to get worse. That first terrible, horrible, frightening day was going to be as good as it got.

He got to school early, went to the form room, sat down at his desk. He was safe enough there. The kids who had given him a hard time yesterday were probably not the sort to arrive at school first thing; they’d be off somewhere smoking and taking drugs and raping people, he thought darkly. There were a couple of girls in the room, but they ignored him, unless the snort of laughter he heard while he was getting his reading book out had anything to do with him.

What was there to laugh at? Not much, really, unless you were the kind of person who was on permanent lookout for something to laugh at. Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of person most kids were, in his experience. They patrolled up and down school corridors like sharks, except that what they were on the lookout for wasn’t flesh but the wrong trousers, or the wrong haircut, or the wrong shoes, any or all of which sent them wild with excitement. As he was usually wearing the wrong shoes or the wrong trousers, and his haircut was wrong all the time, every day of the week, he didn’t have to do very much to send them all demented.

Marcus knew he was weird, and he knew that part of the reason he was weird was because his mum was weird. She just didn’t get this, any of it. She was always telling him that only shallow people made judgements on the basis of clothes or hair; she didn’t want him to watch rubbish television, or listen to rubbish music, or play rubbish computer games (she thought they were all rubbish), which meant that if he wanted to do anything that any of the other kids spent their time doing he had to argue with her for hours. He usually lost, and she was so good at arguing that he felt good about losing. She could explain why listening to Joni Mitchell and Bob Marley (who happened to be her two favourite singers) was much better for him than listening to Snoop Doggy Dogg, and why it was more important to read books than to play on the Gameboy his dad had given him. But he couldn’t pass any of this on to the kids at school. If he tried to tell Lee Hartley—the biggest and loudest and nastiest of the kids he’d met yesterday—that he didn’t approve of Snoop Doggy Dogg because Snoop Doggy Dogg had a bad attitude to women, Lee Hartley would thump him, or call him something that he didn’t want to be called. It wasn’t so bad in Cambridge, because there were loads of kids who weren’t right for school, and loads of mums who had made them that way, but in London it was different. The kids were harder and meaner and less understanding, and it seemed to him that if his mum had made him change schools just because she had found a better job, then she should at least have the decency to stop all that let’s-talk-about-this stuff.

He was quite happy at home, listening to Joni Mitchell and reading books, but it didn’t do him any good at school. It was funny, because most people would probably think the opposite—that reading books at home was bound to help, but it didn’t: it made him different, and because he was different he felt uncomfortable, and because he felt uncomfortable he could feel himself floating away from everyone and everything, kids and teachers and lessons.

It wasn’t all his mum’s fault. Sometimes he was weird just because of who he was, rather than what she did. Like the singing… When was he going to learn about the singing? He always had a tune in his head, but every now and again, when he was nervous, the tune just sort of slipped out. For some reason he couldn’t spot the difference between inside and outside, because there didn’t seem to be a difference. It was like when you went swimming in a heated pool on a warm day, and you could get out of the water without noticing that you were getting out, because the temperatures were the same; that seemed to be what happened with the singing. Anyway, a song had slipped out yesterday during English, while the teacher was reading; if you wanted to make people laugh at you, really, really laugh, then the best way, he had discovered, better even than to have a bad haircut, was to sing out loud when everybody else in the room was quiet and bored.

This morning he was OK until the first period after break. He was quiet during registration, he avoided people in the corridors, and then it was double maths, which he enjoyed, and which he was good at, although they were doing stuff that he’d already done before. At breaktime he went to tell Mr Brooks, one of the other maths teachers, that he wanted to join his computer club. He was pleased he did that, because his instinct was to stay in the form room and read, but he toughed it out; he even had to cross the playground.

But then in English things went bad again. They were using one of those books that had a bit of everything in them; the bit they were looking at was taken from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He knew the story, because he’d seen the film with his mum, and so he could see really clearly, so clearly that he wanted to run from the room, what was going to happen.

When it happened it was even worse than he thought it was going to be. Ms Maguire got one of the girls who she knew was a good reader to read out the passage, and then she tried to get a discussion going.

‘Now, one of the things this book is about is… How do we know who’s mad and who isn’t? Because, you know, in a way we’re all a bit mad, and if someone decides that we’re a bit mad, how do we… how do we show them we’re sane?’

Silence. A couple of the kids sighed and rolled their eyes at each other. One thing Marcus had noticed was that when you came into a school late you could tell straight away how well the teachers got on with a class. Ms Maguire was young and nervous and she was struggling, he reckoned. This class could go either way.

‘OK, let’s put it another way. How can we tell if people are mad?’

Here it comes, he thought. Here it comes. This is it.

‘If they sing for no reason in class, miss.’

Laughter. But then it all got worse than he’d expected. Everyone turned round and looked at him; he looked at Ms Maguire, but she had this big forced grin on and she wouldn’t catch his eye.

‘OK, that’s one way of telling, yes. You’d think that someone who does that would be a little potty. But leaving Marcus out of it for a moment…’

More laughter. He knew what she was doing and why, and he hated her.

Four

Will first saw Angie—or, as it turned out, he didn’t see her—in Championship Vinyl, a little record shop off the Holloway Road. He was browsing, filling up the time, vaguely trying to hunt down an old R & B anthology he used to own when he was younger, one of those he had loved and lost; he heard her tell the surly and depressive assistant that she was looking for a Pinky and Perky record for her niece. He was trawling through the racks while she was being served, so he never caught a glimpse of her face, but he saw a lot of honey-blond hair, and he heard the kind of vaguely husky voice that he and everyone else thought of as sexy, so he listened while she explained that her niece didn’t even know who Pinky and Perky were. ‘Don’t you think that’s terrible? Fancy being five and not knowing who Pinky and Perky are! What are they teaching these kids!’

She was trying to be jolly, but Will had learnt to his cost that jollity was frowned upon in Championship Vinyl. She was, as he knew she would be, met with a withering look of contempt and a mumble which indicated that she was wasting the assistant’s valuable time.

Two days later, he found himself sitting next to the same woman in a café on Upper Street. He recognized her voice (they both ordered a cappuccino and croissant), the blond hair and her denim jacket. They both got up to get one of the café’s newspapers—she took the Guardian, so he was left with the Mail—and he smiled, but she clearly didn’t remember him, and he would have left it at that if she hadn’t been so pretty.

‘I like Pinky and Perky,’ he said in what he hoped was a gentle, friendly and humorously patronizing tone, but he could see immediately that he had made a terrible mistake, that this was not the same woman, that she didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. He wanted to tear out his tongue and grind it into the wooden floor with his foot.

She looked at him, smiled nervously and glanced across at the waiter, probably calculating how long it would take for the waiter to hurl himself across the room and wrestle Will to the floor. Will both understood and sympathized. If a complete stranger were to sit down next to you in a coffee shop and tell you quietly that he liked Pinky and Perky as an opening conversational gambit, you could only presume that you were about to be decapitated and hidden under the floorboards.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’ He blushed, and the blush seemed to relax her: his embarrassment was some kind of indication of sanity, at least. They returned to their newspapers, but the woman kept breaking into a smile and looking across at him.

‘I know this sounds nosy,’ she said eventually, ‘but I’ve got to ask you. Who did you think I was? I’ve been trying to come up with some kind of story, and I can’t.’

So he explained, and she laughed again, and then finally he was given a chance to start over and converse normally. They talked about not working in the morning (he didn’t own up to not working in the afternoon either), and the record shop, and Pinky and Perky, of course, and several other children’s television characters. He had never before attempted to start a relationship cold in this way, but by the time they had finished their second cappuccino he had a phone number and a date for dinner.

When they met again she told him about her kids straight away; he wanted to throw his napkin on the floor, push the table over and run.

‘So?’ he said. It was, of course, the right thing to say.

‘I just thought you ought to know. It makes a difference to some people.’

‘In what way?’

‘Guys, I mean.’

‘Well, yes, I worked that out.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m not making this very easy, am I?’

‘You’re doing fine.’

‘It’s just that… if this is a date date, and it feels like one to me, then I thought I ought to tell you.’

‘Thank you. But really, it’s no problem. I would have been disappointed if you didn’t have children.’

She laughed. ‘Disappointed? Why?’

This was a good question. Why? Obviously he had said it because he thought it sounded smooth and winning, but he couldn’t tell her that.

‘Because I’ve never been out with someone who was a mum before, and I’ve always wanted to. I think I’d be good at it.’

‘Good at what?’

Right. Good at what? What was he good at? This was the million-dollar question, the one he had never been able to answer about anything. Maybe he would be good at children, even though he hated them and everyone responsible for bringing them into the world. Maybe he had written John and Christine and baby Imogen off too hastily. Maybe this was it! Uncle Will!

‘I don’t know. Good at kids’ things. Messing about things.’

He must be, surely. Everyone was, weren’t they? Maybe he should have been working with kids all this time. Maybe this was a turning point in his life!

It had to be said that Angie’s beauty was not irrelevant to his decision to reassess his affinity with children. The long blond hair, he now knew, was accompanied by a calm, open face, big blue eyes and extraordinarily sexy crows’ feet—she was beautiful in a very winning, wholesome, Julie Christie-type way. And that was the point. When had he ever been out with a woman who looked like Julie Christie? People who looked like Julie Christie didn’t go out with people like him. They went out with other film stars, or peers of the realm, or Formula One drivers. What was happening here? He decided that children were what was happening here; that children served as a symbolic blemish, like a birthmark or obesity, which gave him a chance where previously there would have been none. Maybe children democratized beautiful single women.

‘I’ll tell you,’ Angie was saying, although he had missed much of the cogitation that had brought her to this point, ‘when you’re a single mother, you’re far more likely to end up thinking in feminist clichés. You know, all men are bastards, a woman without a man is like a… a… something without a something that doesn’t have any relation to the first something; all that stuff.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Will, sympathetically. He was getting excited now. If single mothers really thought that all men were bastards, then he could clean up. He could go out with women who looked like Julie Christie forever. He nodded and frowned and pursed his lips while Angie ranted, and while he plotted his new, life-changing strategy.

For the next few weeks he was Will the Good Guy, Will the Redeemer, and he loved it. It was effortless, too. He never managed to strike up much of a rapport with Maisy, Angie’s mysteriously sombre five-year-old, who seemed to regard him as frivolous to his core. But Joe, the three-year-old, took to him almost at once, mostly because during their first meeting Will held him upside-down by his ankles. That was it. That was all it took. He wished that relationships with proper human beings were that easy.

They went to McDonald’s. They went to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. They went on a boat down the river. On the very few occasions when he had thought about the possibility of children (always when he was drunk, always in the first throes of a new relationship), he had convinced himself that fatherhood would be a sort of sentimental photo-opportunity, and fatherhood Angie-style was exactly like that: he could walk hand-in-hand with a beautiful woman, children gambolling happily in front of him, and everyone could see him doing it, and when he had done it for an afternoon he could go home again if he wanted to.

And then there was the sex. Sex with a single mother, Will decided after his first night with Angie, beat the sort of sex he was used to hands down. If you picked the right woman, someone who’d been messed around and eventually abandoned by the father of her children, and who hadn’t met anyone since (because the kids stopped you going out and anyway a lot of men didn’t like kids that didn’t belong to them, and they didn’t like the kind of mess that frequently coiled around these kids like a whirlwind)… if you picked one of these, then she loved you for it. All of a sudden you became better-looking, a better lover, a better person.

As far as he could see, it was an entirely happy arrangement. All those so-so couplings going on out in the world of the childless singles, to whom a night in a foreign bed was just another fuck… they didn’t know what they were missing. Sure, there were right-on people, men and women, who would be repelled and appalled by his logic, but that was fine by him. It reduced the competition.

In the end, the thing that swung it for him in his affair with Angie was that he was not Someone Else. That meant in this case he wasn’t Simon, her ex, who had problems with drink and work, and who, with a cavalier disregard for cliché, turned out to be screwing his secretary. Will found it easy not to be Simon; he had a positive flair for not being Simon, he was brilliant at it. It seemed unfair, in fact, that something he found so effortless should bring him any kind of reward at all, but it did: he was loved for not being Simon more than he had ever been loved simply for being himself.

Even the end, when it came, had an enormous amount to recommend it. Will found endings difficult: he had never quite managed to grasp the bull by the horns, and as a consequence there had hitherto always been some kind of messy overlap. But with Angie it was easy—indeed, it was so easy that he felt there had to be some kind of catch.

They had been going out for six weeks, and there were certain things that he was beginning to find unsatisfactory. Angie wasn’t very flexible, for a start, and the whole kid thing really got in the way sometimes—the week before he had bought tickets for the new Mike Leigh film on the opening night, but she didn’t make it to the cinema until thirty minutes after it had started because the babysitter hadn’t turned up. That really pissed him off, although he felt he managed to disguise his annoyance pretty well, and they had a reasonable evening out anyway. And she could never stay over at his place, so he always had to go round there, and she didn’t have many CDs, and there was no VCR or satellite or cable, so on a Saturday night they always ended up watching Casualty and a crap made-for-TV movie about some kid with a disease. He was just beginning to wonder whether Angie was exactly what he was looking for when she decided to finish it.

They were in an Indian restaurant on Holloway Road when she told him.

‘Will, I’m so sorry, but I’m not sure this is working out.’

He didn’t say anything. In the past, any conversation that began in this way usually meant that she had found something out, or that he had done something mean, or stupid, or grotesquely insensitive, but he really thought that he had kept a clean sheet in this relationship. His silence bought him time while he scanned through the memory bank for any indiscretions he might have forgotten about, but there was nothing. He would have been extremely disappointed if he had found something, an overlooked infidelity, say, or a casual, unmemorable cruelty. As the whole point of this relationship was his niceness, any blemish would have meant that his untrustworthiness was so deeply ingrained as to be ungovernable.

‘It’s not you. You’ve been great. It’s me. Well, my situation, anyway.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with your situation. Not as far as I’m concerned.’ He was so relieved that he felt like being generous.

‘There are things you don’t know. Things about Simon.’

‘Is he giving you a hard time? Because if he is…’ You’ll what? he wanted to ask himself contemptuously. You’ll roll yourself a joint when you get home and forget them? You’ll go out with someone a lot easier?

‘No, not really. Well, I suppose it would look like that from the outside. He’s not very happy about me seeing somebody else. And I know how that sounds, but I know him, and he just hasn’t come to terms with us splitting up. And I’m not sure I have either, more to the point. I’m not ready to launch into a relationship with anybody new yet.’

‘You’ve been doing pretty well.’

‘The tragedy is that I’ve met someone just right for me at precisely the wrong time. I should have started with a meaningless fling, not a… not with someone who…’

This, he couldn’t help feeling, was kind of ironic. If she but knew it, he was exactly right; if there was a man better equipped for the meaningless fling, he wouldn’t like to meet him. I’ve been putting this on! he wanted to tell her. I’m horrible! I’m much shallower than this, honest! But it was too late.

‘I did wonder whether I was rushing you. I’ve really cocked this up, haven’t I?’

‘No, Will, not at all. You’ve been brilliant. I’m so sorry that…’

She was starting to get a little tearful, and he loved her for it. He had never before watched a woman cry without feeling responsible, and he was rather enjoying the experience.

‘You don’t have to be sorry for anything. Really.’ Really, really, really.

‘Oh, I do.’

‘You don’t.’

When was the last time he had been in a position to bestow forgiveness? Certainly not since school, and possibly not even then. Of all the evenings he had spent with Angie, he loved the last one the best.

This, for Will, was the clincher. He knew then that there would be other women like Angie—women who would start off by thinking that they wanted a regular fuck, and end up deciding that a quiet life was worth any number of noisy orgasms. As he felt something not dissimilar, although for very different reasons, he knew he had a lot to offer. Great sex, a lot of ego massage, temporary parenthood without tears and a guilt-free parting—what more could a man want? Single mothers—bright, attractive, available women, thousands of them, all over London—were the best invention Will had ever heard of. His career as a serial nice guy had begun.

Five

One Monday morning his mother started crying before breakfast, and it frightened him. Morning crying was something new, and it was a bad, bad sign. It meant that it could now happen at any hour of the day without warning; there was no safe time. Up until today the mornings had been OK; she seemed to wake up with the hope that whatever was making her unhappy would somehow have vanished overnight, in her sleep, the way colds and upset stomachs sometimes did. And she had sounded OK this morning—not angry, not unhappy, not mad, just kind of normal and mum-like—when she shouted for him to get a move on. But here she was, already at it, slumped over the kitchen table in her dressing-gown, a half-eaten piece of toast on her plate, her face all puffed-up, snot pouring out of her nose.

Marcus never said anything when she cried. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t understand why she did it, and because he didn’t understand he couldn’t help, and because he couldn’t help, he just ended up standing there and staring at her with his mouth open, and she’d just carry on as if nothing was happening.

‘Do you want some tea?’

He had to guess at what she was saying, because she was so snuffled up.

‘Yeah. Please.’ He took a clean bowl from the draining board and went to the larder to choose his cereal. That cheered him up. He’d forgotten that she’d let him put a variety pack in the supermarket trolley on Saturday morning. He went through all the usual agonies of indecision: he knew he should get through the boring stuff, the cornflakes and the one with fruit in it, first of all, because if he didn’t eat them now he’d never eat them, and they’d just sit on the shelf until they got stale, and Mum would get cross with him, and for the next few months he’d have to stick to an economy-sized packet of something horrible. He understood all that, yet still he went for the Coco Pops, as he always did. His mother didn’t notice—the first advantage of her terrible depression that he’d found so far. It wasn’t a big advantage, though; on the whole he’d rather she was cheerful enough to send him back to the larder. He’d quite happily give up Coco Pops if she’d give up crying all the time.

He ate his cereal, drank his tea, picked up his bag and gave his mother a kiss, just a normal one, not a soppy, understanding one, and went out. Neither of them said a word. What else was he supposed to do?

On the way to school he tried to work out what was wrong with her. What could be wrong with her that he wouldn’t know about? She was in work, so they weren’t poor, although they weren’t rich either—she was a music therapist, which meant that she was a sort of teacher of handicapped children, and she was always saying that the money was pitiful, pathetic, lousy, a crime. But they had enough for the flat, and for food, and for holidays once a year, and even for computer games, once in a while. What else made you cry, apart from money? Death? But he’d know if anybody important had died; she would only cry that much about Grandma, Grandpa, his uncle Tom and Tom’s family, and they’d seen them all the previous weekend, at his cousin Ella’s fourth birthday party. Something to do with men? He knew she wanted a boyfriend; but he knew because she joked about it sometimes, and he couldn’t see that it was possible to go from joking about something now and again to crying about it all the time. Anyway, she was the one who had got rid of Roger, and if she was desperate she would have kept it going. So what else was there? He tried to remember what people cried about in EastEnders, apart from money, death and boyfriends, but it wasn’t very helpful: prison sentences, unwanted pregnancies, Aids, stuff that didn’t seem to apply to his mum.

He’d forgotten about it all by the time he was inside the school gates. It wasn’t like he’d decided to forget about it. It was simply that an instinct for self-preservation took over. When you were having trouble with Lee Hartley and his mates, it hardly mattered whether your mum was going round the bend or not. But it was OK, this morning. He could see them all leaning against the wall of the gym, huddled around some item of treasure, safe in the distance, so he reached the form room without any difficulty.

His friends Nicky and Mark were already there, playing Tetris on Mark’s Gameboy. He went over to them.

‘All right?’

Nicky said hello, but Mark was too absorbed to notice him. He tried to position himself so he could see how Mark was getting on, but Nicky was standing in the only place that offered a glimpse of the Gameboy’s tiny screen, so he sat on a desk waiting for them to finish. They didn’t finish. Or rather, they did, but then they just started again; they didn’t offer him a game or put it away because he had arrived. Marcus felt he was being left out deliberately, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to have done wrong.

‘Are you going to the computer room at lunchtime?’ That was how he knew Nicky and Mark—through the computer club. It was a stupid question, because they always went. If they didn’t go, then like him they would be tiptoeing timidly around the edges of lunchtime, trying not to get noticed by anybody with a big mouth and a sharp haircut.

‘Dunno. Maybe. What do you reckon, Mark?’

‘Dunno. Probably.’

‘Right. See you there, then, maybe.’

He’d see them before then. He was seeing them now, for example—it wasn’t like he was going anywhere. But it was something to say.

Breaktime was the same: Nicky and Mark on the Gameboy, Marcus hovering around on the outside. OK, they weren’t real friends—not like the friends he’d had in Cambridge—but they got on OK, usually, if only because they weren’t like the other kids in their class. Marcus had even been to Nicky’s house once, after school one day. They knew they were nerdy and geeky and all the other things some of the girls called them (all three of them wore specs, none of them was bothered about clothes, Mark had ginger hair and freckles, and Nicky looked a good three years younger than everyone else in year seven), but it didn’t worry them much. The important thing was that they had each other, that they weren’t hugging the corridors trying desperately not to get noticed.

‘Oi! Fuzzy! Give us a song.’ A couple of year eights were standing in the doorway. Marcus didn’t know them, so his fame was obviously spreading. He tried to look more purposeful: he craned his neck to make it look as though he was concentrating on the Gameboy, but he still couldn’t see anything, and anyway Mark and Nicky started to back away, leaving him on his own.

‘Hey, Ginger! Chris Evans! Speccy!’ Mark started to redden.

‘They’re all speccy.’

‘Yeah, I forgot. Oi, Ginger Speccy! Is that a love bite on your neck?’

They thought this was hilarious. They always made jokes about girls and sex; he didn’t know why. Probably because they were sex-mad.

Mark gave up the struggle and turned the Gameboy off. This had been happening a lot recently, and there wasn’t much you could do about it. You just had to stand there and take it until they got bored. It was finding something to do in the meantime, some way to be and to look, that made it difficult. Marcus had recently taken to making lists in his head; his mum had a game where you had cards with categories on them, like, say, ‘Puddings’, and the other team had to guess what twelve examples were on the card, and then you swapped round and had to guess what twelve examples were on the other team’s card, like ‘Football teams’. He couldn’t play it here because he didn’t have the cards and there wasn’t another team, but he played a variation of this: he thought of something that had lots of examples, like, say, ‘Fruit’, and tried to think of as many different fruits as he could before whoever it was who was giving them a hard time went away again.

Chocolate bars. Mars, of course. Snickers. Bounty. Were there any more ice-cream ones? He couldn’t remember. Topic. Picnic.

‘Hey, Marcus, who’s your favourite rapper? Tupac? Warren G?’ Marcus knew these names, but he didn’t know what they meant, or any of their songs, and anyway he knew he wasn’t meant to give an answer. If he gave an answer he’d be sunk.

His mind had gone blank, but then this was part of the point of the game. It would be easy to think of the names of chocolate bars at home, but here, with these kids giving him a hard time, it was almost impossible.

Milky Way.

‘Oi, Midget, do you know what a blow job is?’ Nicky was pretending to stare out of the window, but Marcus could tell he wasn’t seeing anything at all.

Picnic. No, he’d already had that one.

‘Come on, this is boring.’

And they were gone. Only six. Pathetic.

The three of them didn’t say anything for a while. Then Nicky looked at Mark, and Mark looked at Nicky, and finally Mark spoke.

‘Marcus, we don’t want you hanging around with us any more.’

He didn’t know how to react, so he said, ‘Oh,’ and then, ‘Why not?’

‘Because of them.’

‘They’re nothing to do with me.’

‘Yes they are. We never got in any trouble with anyone before we knew you, and now we get this every day.’

Marcus could see that. He could imagine that if they had never met him, Nicky and Mark would have had as much contact with Lee Hartley and the rest of them as koala bears have with piranha fish. But now, because of him, the koala bears had fallen into the sea and the piranhas were taking an interest in them. Nobody had hurt them, not yet, and Marcus knew all the stuff about sticks and stones and names. But insults were hurled in just the same way as missiles, if you thought about it, and if other people happened to be standing in the line of fire they got hit too. That’s what had happened with Nicky and Mark: he had made them visible, he had turned them into targets, and if he was any kind of a friend at all he’d take himself well away from them. It’s just that he had nowhere else to go.

Six

I’m a single father. I have a two-year-old boy. I’m a single father. I have a two-year-old boy. I’m a single father. I have a two-year-old boy. However many times Will told himself this, he could always find some reason that prevented him from believing it; in his own head—not the place that counted the most, but important nevertheless—he didn’t feel like a parent. He was too young, too old, too stupid, too smart, too groovy, too impatient, too selfish, too careless, too careful (whatever the contraceptive circumstances of the woman he was seeing, he always, always used a Durex, even in the days before you had to), he didn’t know enough about kids, he went out too often, he drank too much, he took too many drugs. When he looked in the mirror, he didn’t, couldn’t, see a dad, especially a single dad.

He was trying to see a single dad in the mirror because he had run out of single mums to sleep with; in fact, Angie had so far proved to be both the beginning and the end of his supply. It was all very well deciding that single mums were the future, that there were millions of sad, Julie Christie-like waifs just dying for his call, but the frustrating truth was that he didn’t have any of their phone numbers. Where did they hang out?

It took him longer than it should have done to realize that, by definition, single mothers had children, and children, famously, prevented one from hanging out anywhere. He had made a few gentle, half-hearted enquiries of friends and acquaintances, but had so far failed to make any real headway; the people he knew either didn’t know any single mothers, or were unwilling to effect the necessary introductions due to Will’s legendarily poor romantic track record. But now he had found the ideal solution to this unexpected dearth of prey. He had invented a two-year-old son called Ned and had joined a single parents’ group.

Most people would not have bothered to go to these lengths to indulge a whim, but Will quite often bothered to do things that most people wouldn’t bother to do, simply because he had the time to bother. Doing nothing all day gave him endless opportunities to dream and scheme and pretend to be something he wasn’t. He had, after a fit of remorse following a weekend of extreme self-indulgence, volunteered to work in a soup kitchen, and even though he never actually reported for duty, the phone call had allowed him to pretend, for a couple of days, that he was the kind of guy who might. And he had thought about VSO and filled in the forms, and he had cut out an advert in the local paper about teaching slow learners to read, and he had contacted estate agents about opening a restaurant and then a bookshop…

The point was that if you had a history of pretending, then joining a single parent group when you were not a single parent was neither problematic nor particularly scary. If it didn’t work out, then he’d just have to try something else. It was no big deal.

SPAT (Single Parents—Alone Together) met on the first Thursday of the month in a local adult education centre, and tonight was Will’s first time. He was almost sure that tonight would be his last time, too: he’d get something wrong, like the name of Postman Pat’s cat, or the colour of Noddy’s car (or, more crucially, the name of his own child—for some reason he couldn’t stop thinking of him as Ted, and he had only christened him Ned this morning), and he’d be exposed as a fraud and frogmarched off the premises. If there was a chance of meeting someone like Angie, however, it had to be worth a try.

The car park at the centre contained just one other vehicle, a beaten-up B-reg 2CV which had, according to the stickers in its window, been to Chessington World of Adventure and Alton Towers; Will’s car, a new GTi, hadn’t been anywhere like that at all. Why not? He couldn’t think of any reason why not, apart from the glaringly obvious one, that he was a childless single man aged thirty-six and therefore had never had the desire to drive miles and miles to plunge down a plastic fairy mountain on a tea-tray.

The centre depressed him. He hadn’t set foot inside a place with classrooms and corridors and home-made posters for nearly twenty years, and he had forgotten that British education smelt of disinfectant. It hadn’t occurred to him that he wouldn’t be able to find the SPAT party. He thought he’d be led straight to it by the happy buzz of people forgetting their troubles and getting roaring drunk, but there was no happy buzz, just the distant, mournful clank of a bucket. Finally he spotted a piece of file paper pinned to a classroom door with the word SPAT! scrawled on it in felt-tip pen. The exclamation mark put him off. It was trying too hard.

There was only one woman in the room. She was taking bottles—of white wine, beer, mineral water and supermarket-brand cola—out of a cardboard box and putting them on to a table in the centre of the room. The rest of the tables had been pushed to the back; the chairs were stacked in rows behind them. It was the most desolate party venue Will had ever seen.

‘Have I come to the right place?’ he asked the woman. She had pointy features and red cheeks; she looked like Worzel Gummidge’s friend Aunt Sally.

‘SPAT? Come in. Are you Will? I’m Frances.’

He smiled and shook her hand. He had spoken to Frances on the phone earlier in the day.

‘I’m sorry there’s nobody else here yet. We quite often get off to a slow start. Babysitters.’

‘Of course.’ So he was wrong to be prompt. He had more or less given himself away already. And, of course, he should never have said ‘of course’, which implied that she had clarified something he was finding puzzling. He should have rolled his eyes and said, ‘Tell me about it’, or, ‘Don’t talk to me about babysitters’, something weary and conspiratorial.

Maybe it wasn’t too late. He rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t talk to me about babysitters,’ he said. He laughed bitterly and shook his head, just for good measure. Frances ignored the eccentric conversational timing and took the cue.

‘Did you have trouble tonight, then?’

‘No. My mother’s looking after him.’ He was proud of the use of the pronoun. It implied familiarity. On the debit side, though, there had been an awful lot of head-shaking, eye-rolling and bitter laughter for a man with no apparent baby-sitting difficulties.

‘I’ve had trouble before, though,’ he added hastily. The conversation was less than two minutes old and already he was a nervous wreck.

‘Haven’t we all?’ said Frances.

Will laughed heartily. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know I have.’

It was now perfectly clear, he felt, that he was either a liar or a lunatic, but before he could dig himself any deeper into a hole which was already shipping water other SPAT members—all of them women, all but one of them in their thirties—started to arrive. Frances introduced him to each of them: Sally and Moira, who looked tough, ignored him completely, helped themselves to a paper cupful of white wine and disappeared off to the further corner of the room (Moira, Will noted with interest, was wearing a Lorena Bobbitt T-shirt); Lizzie, who was small, sweet and scatty; Helen and Susannah, who obviously regarded SPAT as beneath their dignity, and made rude comments about the wine and the location; Saskia, who was ten years younger than anybody else in the room, and looked more like somebody’s daughter than somebody’s mother; and Suzie, who was tall, blond, pale, nervy-looking and beautiful. She would do, he thought, and stopped looking at anyone else who came in. Blond and beautiful were two of the qualities he was looking for; pale and nervy-looking were two of the qualities that gave him the right to do so.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Will, I’m new, and I don’t know anybody.’

‘Hello, Will. I’m Suzie, I’m old, and I know everybody.’ He laughed. She laughed. He spent as much of the evening as courtesy allowed in her company.

His conversation with Frances had sharpened him up, so he did better on the Ned front. In any case Suzie wanted to talk, and in these circumstances he was extremely happy to listen. There was a lot to listen to. Suzie had been married to a man called Dan, who had started an affair when she was six months pregnant and had left her the day before she went into labour. Dan had only seen his daughter Megan once, accidentally, in the Body Shop in Islington. He hadn’t seemed to want to see her again. Suzie was now poor (she was trying to retrain as a nutritionist) and bitter, and Will could understand why.

Suzie looked around the room.

‘One of the reasons I like coming here is that you can be angry and no one thinks any the less of you,’ she said. ‘Just about everyone’s got something they’re angry about.’

‘Really?’ They didn’t look that angry to Will.

‘Let’s see who’s here… The woman in the denim shirt over there? Her husband went because he thought their little boy wasn’t his. Ummm… Helen… boring… he went off with someone from work… Moira… he came out… Susannah Curtis… I think he was running two families…’

There were endless ingenious variations on the same theme. Men who took one look at their new child and went, men who took one look at their new colleague and went, men who went for the hell of it. Immediately Will understood Moira’s sanctification of Lorena Bobbitt completely; by the time Suzie had finished her litany of treachery and deceit, he wanted to cut off his own penis with a kitchen knife.

‘Aren’t there any other men who come to SPAT?’ he asked Suzie.

‘Just one. Jeremy. He’s on holiday.’

‘So women do leave sometimes?’

‘Jeremy’s wife was killed in a car crash.’

‘Oh. Oh well.’

Will was becoming so depressed about his sex that he decided to redress the balance.

‘So. I’m on my own,’ he said, in what he hoped was a mysteriously wistful tone.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Suzie. ‘I haven’t asked you anything about yourself.’

‘Oh… It doesn’t matter.’

‘Did you get dumped then?’

‘Well, I suppose I did, yes.’ He gave her a sad, stoical smile.

‘And does your ex see Ned?’

‘Sometimes. She’s not really that bothered.’ He was beginning to feel better; it was good to be the bearer of bad news about women. True, this bad news was entirely fictitious, but there was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his role-playing had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting, yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word. He wasn’t a fraud. He was Robert De Niro.

‘How does he cope with that?’

‘Oh… he’s a good little boy. Very brave.’

‘They have amazing resources, kids, don’t they?’

To his astonishment he found himself blinking back a tear, and Suzie put a reassuring hand on his arm. He was in here, no doubt about it.

Seven

Some things carried on as normal. He went to his dad’s in Cambridge for the weekend and watched a load of telly. On the Sunday he and his dad and Lindsey, his dad’s girlfriend, went to Lindsey’s mum’s house in Norfolk, and they went for a walk on the beach and Lindsey’s mum gave him a fiver for no reason. He liked Lindsey’s mum. He liked Lindsey, too. Even his mum liked Lindsey, although she said nasty things about her every now and again. (He never stuck up for her. In fact, he stored up stupid things that Lindsey said or did and told his mum about them when he got home; it was easier that way.) Everyone was OK, really. It was just that there were so many of them now. But he got on with them all OK, and they didn’t think he was weird, or at least they didn’t seem to. He went back to school wondering whether he’d been making a fuss about nothing.

On the way home, though, it all started again, in the newsagent’s round the corner. They were nice in there, and they didn’t mind him looking at the computer magazines. He could stand browsing for ten minutes or so before they said anything, and even then they were gentle and jokey about it, not mean and anti-kid, like in so many of the shops. ‘Only three children allowed in at the same time.’ He hated all that. You were a thief just because of how old you were… He wouldn’t go in shops that had that sign in the window. He wouldn’t give them his money.

‘How’s your lovely mum, Marcus?’ the man behind the counter asked when he walked in. They liked his mother here, because she talked to them about the place where they came from; she had been there once, a long time ago, when she was a real hippy.

‘She’s OK.’ He wasn’t going to tell them anything.

He found the magazine he’d got halfway through last week, and forgot about everything else. The next thing he knew they were all in there, crowded in really close, and they were laughing at him again. He was sick of that sound. If no one laughed again in the whole world for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t care.

‘What you singing, Fuzzy?’

He’d done it again. He’d been thinking of one of his mum’s songs, a Joni Mitchell one about a taxi, but it had obviously slipped out again. They all started humming tunelessly, throwing in nonsense words every now and again, prodding him to get him to turn round. He ignored them, and tried to concentrate on what he was reading. He didn’t need to think of stuff like chocolate bars when he had a computer article to lose himself in. He started off just pretending, but within seconds he was properly lost, and he forgot all about them, and the next thing he knew they were on their way out of the shop.

‘Oi, Mohammed,’ one of them shouted. That wasn’t Mr Patel’s name. ‘You ought to check his pockets. He’s been thieving.’ And then they were gone. He checked his own pockets. They were full of chocolate bars and packets of chewing gum. He hadn’t even noticed. He felt sick. He started trying to explain, but Mr Patel interrupted him.

‘I was watching them, Marcus. It’s OK.’

He walked over to the counter and piled the stuff on top of the newspapers.

‘Are they at your school?’

Marcus nodded.

‘You’d better keep out of their way.’

Yeah, right. Bloody hell. Keep out of their way.

When he got home his mother was lying on the floor with a coat draped over her, watching children’s cartoons. She didn’t look up.

‘Didn’t you go to work today?’

‘This morning. I took the afternoon off sick.’

‘What kind of sick?’

No answer.

This wasn’t right. He was only a kid. He’d been thinking that more and more recently, as he got older and older. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was because, when he really was only a kid, he wasn’t capable of recognizing it—you had to be a certain age before you realized that you were actually quite young. Or maybe when he was little there was nothing to worry about—five or six years ago his mum never spent half the day shivering under a coat watching stupid cartoons, and even if she had he might not have thought it was anything out of the ordinary.

But something was going to have to give. He was having a shit time at school and a shit time at home, and as home and school was all there was to it, just about, that meant he was having a shit time all the time, apart from when he was asleep. Someone was going to have to do something about it, because he couldn’t do anything about it himself, and he couldn’t see who else there was, apart from the woman under the coat.

She was funny, his mum. She was all for talking. She was always on at him to talk and tell her things, but he was sure she didn’t really mean it. She was fine on the little things, but he knew that if he went for the big stuff then there’d be trouble, especially now, when she cried and cried about nothing. But at the moment he couldn’t see any way of avoiding it. He was only a kid, and she was his mum, and if he felt bad it was her job to stop him feeling bad, simple as that. Even if she didn’t want to, even if it meant that she’d end up feeling worse. Tough. Too bad. He was angry enough to talk to her now.

‘What are you watching this for? It’s rubbish. You’re always telling me.’

‘I thought you liked cartoons.’

‘I do. I just don’t like this one. It’s terrible.’

They both stared at the screen without speaking. This weird dog-type thing was trying to get at a boy who could turn himself into a kind of flying saucer.

‘What sort of sick?’ He asked the question roughly, the way a teacher would ask someone like Paul Cox whether he’d done his homework.

No answer again.

‘Mum, what sort of sick?’

‘Oh, Marcus, it’s not the sort of sick that—’

‘Don’t treat me like an idiot, Mum.’

She started crying again, long, low sobs that terrified him.

‘You’ve got to stop this.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You’ve got to. If you can’t look after me properly then you’ll have to find someone who can.’

She rolled over on to her stomach and looked at him.

‘How can you say I don’t look after you?’

‘Because you don’t. All you do is make my meals and I could do that. The rest of the time you just cry. That’s… that’s no good. That’s no good to me.’

She cried even harder then, and he let her. He went upstairs to his room and played NBA Basketball with the earphones on, even though he wasn’t supposed to on school nights. But when he came downstairs she was up and the duvet had been put away. She was spooning pasta and sauce on to plates, and she seemed OK. He knew she wasn’t OK—he may have been just a kid, but he was old enough to know that people didn’t stop being nuts (and that, he was beginning to realize, was what sort of sick it was) just because you told them to stop—but he didn’t care, as long as she was OK in front of him.

‘You’re going to a picnic on Saturday,’ she said out of the blue.

‘A picnic?’

‘Yes. In Regent’s Park.’

‘Who with?’

‘Suzie.’

‘Not that SPAT lot.’

‘Yes, that SPAT lot.’

‘I hate them.’ Fiona had taken Marcus to a SPAT summer party in someone’s garden when they first moved to London, but she hadn’t been back since; Marcus had been to more meetings than she had, because Suzie had taken him on one of their outings.

‘Tant pis.’

What did she have to say things like that for? He knew it was French for ‘tough shit’, but why couldn’t she just say ‘tough shit’? No wonder he was a weirdo. If you had a mum who spoke French for no reason, you were more or less bound to end up singing out loud in newsagents’ without meaning to. He put loads and loads of cheese on his pasta and stirred it around.

‘Are you going?’

‘No.’

‘So why do I have to?’

‘Because I’m having a rest.’

‘I can keep out of your way.’

‘I’m doing what you said. I’m getting someone else to look after you. Suzie’s much more capable than I am.’

Suzie was her best friend; they’d known each other since school-days. She was nice; Marcus liked her a lot. But he still didn’t want to go on a picnic with her and all those horrible little kids from SPAT. He was ten years older than most of them, and every time he’d done anything with them before, he’d hated it. The last time, when they all went to the zoo, he’d come home and told his mum he wanted a vasectomy. That made her laugh a lot, but he’d meant it. He knew for a fact that he was never going to have children, so why not get it over and done with now?

‘I could do anything. I could sit in my room all day playing games. You wouldn’t even know I was in the house.’

‘I want you to get out. Do something normal. It’s too intense here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean… Oh, I don’t know what I mean. I just know that we’re not doing each other any good.’

Hold on a moment. They didn’t do each other any good? For the first time since his mother had started crying, he wanted to cry too. He knew she wasn’t doing him any good, but he had no idea that it worked both ways. What had he done to her? He couldn’t think of a single thing. One day he’d ask her what she was on about, but not today, not now. He wasn’t sure he’d like the answer.

Eight

‘What a bitch.’

Will looked at his feet and made noises intended to convey to Suzie that his ex-wife wasn’t that bad, not really.

‘Will, it’s just not on. You can’t ring up five minutes in advance and change plans like that. You should’ve told her to…’—she looked around to see whether Marcus, the strange kid they were apparently stuck with for the day, was still listening—‘. . . eff off.’

His ex (who, according to Suzie, was called Paula, a name he must have mentioned the other night) was always going to get the blame for Ned’s non-appearance at the picnic, but he felt obscurely loyal to her in the face of Suzie’s empathetic anger. Had he pushed it too far?

‘Oh, well,’ he kept saying, while Suzie raged on, ‘you know.’

‘You can’t afford to be soft. You’ll just get messed around all the time.’

‘She’s never done it before.’

‘No, but she’ll do it again. You watch. You’re too nice. This is a nasty business. You’ll have to toughen up.’

‘I suppose so.’ Being told that he was too nice, that he needed to be meaner, was an unusual experience for Will, but he was feeling so weedy that it was easy to see how Paula had walked all over him.

‘And the car! I can’t believe she took the car.’

He had forgotten about the car. Paula had also taken that, first thing this morning, for reasons too complicated to explain, thus obliging Will to phone up Suzie and ask for a lift to Regent’s Park.

‘I know, I know. She’s…’ Words failed him. If you looked at the whole picture, the Ned thing and the car thing, Paula had behaved outrageously, he could see that, but it was still hard for him to summon up the requisite anger. He was going to have to, though, if only to show Suzie that he wasn’t a hopeless, spineless wimp. ‘She’s a cow.’

‘That’s more like it.’

It was much more confusing than he had imagined, making people up, and he was beginning to realize that he hadn’t thought it through properly at all. He already had a cast of three—Paula, Ned and his mother (who wasn’t imaginary in quite the same way, having at least been alive once, although not, admittedly, recently)—and he could see that if he was going to carry this through, then there would soon be a cast of thousands. But how could he carry it through? How many times could Ned reasonably be whisked away by his mother, or maternal grandmother, or international terrorists? What reasons could he give for not inviting Suzie round to his flat, where there were no toys or cots or nappies or bowls, where there was no second bedroom even? Could he kill Ned off with some awful disease, or a car crash—tragic, tragic, life goes on? Maybe not. Parents got pretty cut up about kids dying, and he’d find the requisite years of grief a real drain on his thespian resources. What about Paula? Couldn’t he just pack Ned off to her, even though she didn’t want to see him much? Except… except then he wouldn’t be a single father any more. He’d lose the point of himself, somehow.

No, disaster was approaching, and there was nothing he could do about it. Best pull out now, walk away, leave them all with the impression that he was an inadequate eccentric, nothing more—certainly not a pervert, or a fantasist, or any of the bad things he was about to turn into. But walking away wasn’t Will’s style. He always felt something would turn up, even though nothing ever did, or even could, most of the time. Once, years ago, when he was a kid, he told a school-friend (having first ascertained that this friend was not a C. S. Lewis fan) that it was possible to walk through the back of his wardrobe into a different world, and invited him round to explore. He could have cancelled, he could have told him anything, but he was not prepared to suffer a moment’s mild embarrassment if there was no immediate need to do so, and the two of them scrabbled around among the coathangers for several minutes until Will mumbled something about the world being closed on Saturday afternoons. The thing was, he could still remember feeling genuinely hopeful, right up until the last minute: maybe there will be something there, he had thought, maybe I won’t lose face. There wasn’t and he did, loads of it, a whole headful of face, but he hadn’t learnt a thing from the experience: if anything, it seemed to have left him with the feeling that he was bound to be lucky next time. So here he was, in his mid-thirties, knowing in all the places there were to know that he didn’t have a two-year-old son, but still working on the presumption that, when it came to the crunch, one would pop up from somewhere.

‘I’ll bet you could do with a coffee,’ said Suzie.

‘I could murder one. What a morning!’ He shook his head in amazement, and Suzie blew her cheeks out sympathetically. It occurred to him that he was really enjoying himself.

‘I don’t even know what you do,’ Suzie said, when they were settled into the car. Megan was in the baby seat beside her; Will was in the back with Marcus, the weird kid, who was humming tunelessly.

‘Nothing.’

‘Oh.’

He usually made something up, but he had made too much up already over the last few days… if he added a fictitious job to the list, not only would he begin to lose track, he’d be offering Suzie nothing real at all.

‘Well, what did you do before?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You’ve never worked?’

‘I’ve done the odd day here and there, but—’

‘Oh. Well, that’s…’

She trailed off, and Will knew why. Not having a job ever, that’s… nothing. There was nothing to say about it at all, not immediately, anyway.

‘My dad wrote a song. In nineteen thirty-eight. It’s a famous song, and I live off the royalties.’

‘You know Michael Jackson, right? He makes a million pounds a minute,’ said the weird kid.

‘I’m not sure it’s a million pounds a minute,’ said Suzie doubtfully. ‘That’s an awful lot.’

‘A million pounds a minute!’ Marcus repeated. ‘Sixty million pounds an hour!’

‘Well I don’t make sixty million pounds an hour,’ said Will. ‘Nothing like.’

‘How much, then?’

‘Marcus,’ said Suzie. ‘So what’s this song, Will? If you can live off it, we must have heard of it.’

‘Umm… "Santa’s Super Sleigh",’ said Will. He said it neutrally, but it was useless, because there was no way of saying it that didn’t make it sound silly. He wished his father had written any other song in the world, with the possible exception of ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’, or ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?’

‘Really? "Santa’s Super Sleigh"?’ Suzie and Marcus both started singing the same part of the song:

So just leave out the mince pies, and a glass of sherry, And Santa will visit you, and leave you feeling merry, Oh, Santa’s super sleigh, Santa’s super sleigh…

People always did this. They always sang, and they always sang the same part. Will had friends who began every single phone call with a quick burst of ‘Santa’s Super Sleigh’, and when he didn’t laugh they accused him of a sense of humour failure. But where was the joke? And even if there was one, how was he supposed to make himself laugh at it every time, year after year after year?

‘I expect people always do that, don’t they?’

‘You two are the first, actually.’

Suzie glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. ‘Sorry.’

‘No, it’s OK. I ask for it, really.’

‘But I don’t understand. How does that make money? Do carol singers have to pay you ten per cent?’

‘They should do. But you can’t always catch them. No, it’s on every Christmas album ever made. Elvis did it, you know. And the Muppets.’ And Des O’Connor. And the Crankies. And Bing Crosby. And David Bowie, in a duet with Zsa Zsa Gabor. And Val Doonican, and Cilla Black, and Rod Hull and Emu. And an American punk band called the Cunts, and, at the last count, at least a hundred other recording artists. He knew the names from the royalty statements, and he didn’t like any of them. Will prided himself on his cool; he hated making his living from Val Doonican.

‘But haven’t you ever wanted to work?’

‘Oh, yes. Sometimes. It’s just… I don’t know. I never seem to get round to it.’ And that was the long and the short of it. He never seemed to get round to it. Every day for the last eighteen years he had got up in the morning with the intention of sorting out his career problem once and for all; as the day wore on, however, his burning desire to seek a place for himself in the outside world somehow got extinguished.

Suzie parked the car in the Outer Circle and unfolded Megan’s buggy, while Will stood awkwardly on the pavement with Marcus. Marcus had shown no interest in him whatsoever, although he could hardly claim to have made a vigorous effort to get to know the boy. It did occur to Will, however, that there were few adult males better equipped than him to deal with a teenager (if that is what Marcus was—it was hard to tell. He had a strange frizzy bush of hair, and he dressed like a twenty-five-year-old chartered accountant on his day off: he was wearing brand-new jeans and a Microsoft T-shirt). After all, Will was a sports fan and a pop music fan, and he of all people knew how heavy time could hang on one’s hands; to all intents and purposes he was a teenager. And it wouldn’t do him any harm with Suzie if he were to strike up a sparky, mutually curious relationship with her friend’s son. He’d work on Megan later. A quick tickle would probably do the trick.

‘So, Marcus. Who’s your favourite footballer?’

‘I hate football.’

‘Right. What a shame.’

‘Why?’

Will ignored him.

‘Who are your favourite singers then?’

Marcus snorted. ‘Are you getting these questions out of a book?’

Suzie laughed. Will blushed.

‘No, I was just interested.’

‘OK. My favourite singer is Joni Mitchell.’

‘Joni Mitchell? Don’t you like MC Hammer? Or Snoop Doggy Dogg? Or Paul Weller?’

‘No, don’t like any of them.’ Marcus looked Will up and down, taking in the trainers, the haircut and the sunglasses, and added cruelly, ‘Nobody does. Only old people.’

‘What, everyone in your school listens to Joni Mitchell?’

‘Most people.’

Will knew about hip-hop and acid house and grunge and Madchester and indie; he read Time Out and iD and the Face and Arena and the NME, still. But nobody had ever mentioned anything about a Joni Mitchell revival. He felt dispirited.

Marcus went on ahead, and Will made no move to keep up with him. At least his failure gave him a chance to talk to Suzie.

‘Do you have to look after him often?’

‘Not as often as I’d like, eh, Marcus?’

‘What?’ Marcus stopped and waited for them to catch up.

‘I said, I don’t look after you as often as I’d like.’

‘Oh.’

He walked on ahead again, but not as far as before, so Will was unsure about how much he could hear.

‘What’s up with his mum?’ Will asked Suzie quietly.

‘She’s just a bit… I don’t know. Under the weather.’

‘She’s going nuts,’ said Marcus matter-of-factly. ‘Cries all the time. Doesn’t go to work.’

‘Oh, come on, Marcus. She’s just had a couple of afternoons off. We all do that when we’re, you know, off colour.’

‘Off colour? Is that what you call it?’ said Marcus. ‘I call it nuts.’ Will had only previously heard that note of amused belligerence in the voices of old people who were trying to tell you things were much worse than you wanted to pretend: his father had been like that in the last few years of his life.

‘Well, she doesn’t seem nuts to me.’

‘That’s because you don’t see her very often.’

‘I see her as often as I can.’

Will noted the tetchy defensiveness in her voice. What was it with this kid? Once he had seen where you were vulnerable, he was merciless.

‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe? What does "maybe" mean?’

Marcus shrugged. ‘Anyway, she’s not nuts with you. She’s only nuts at home, when it’s the two of us.’

‘She’ll be fine,’ said Suzie. ‘She just needs a weekend taking it easy. We’ll have a nice picnic, and when you get back tonight she’ll be rested up and ready to go.’

Marcus snorted and ran on. They were in the park now, and they could see the SPAT crowd over by the lake in front of them, filling juice containers and unwrapping silver-foil packages.

‘I see her at least once a week,’ said Suzie. ‘And I phone as well. Does he really expect more than that? It’s not as if I’m messing around all day. I study. I’ve got Megan. Jesus.’

‘I don’t believe all these kids are listening to Joni Mitchell,’ said Will. ‘I would have read about it. I’m not that out of touch.’

‘I suppose I’m going to have to ring every day,’ said Suzie.

‘I’m giving up those magazines. They’re useless,’ said Will.

They trudged towards the picnic, feeling old and beaten and found out.

Will felt that his apologies and explanations for Ned’s absence were taken at face value by the SPAT picnickers, although there was, he knew, absolutely no reason why they should not have been. Nobody was so desperate for an egg-and-cress sandwich and a game of rounders that they would go to all the trouble of inventing a child. But he still felt a little uncomfortable, and as a consequence threw himself into the afternoon with an enthusiasm that he was only usually able to muster with chemical or alcoholic assistance. He played ball, he blew bubbles, he burst crisp packets (a mistake—many tears, lots of irritated glances), he hid, he sought, he tickled, he dangled… He did more or less anything that would keep him away from the knot of adults sitting on blankets under a tree, and away from Marcus, who was wandering around the boating lake throwing pieces of leftover sandwich at the ducks.

He didn’t mind. He was better at hiding and seeking than he was at talking, and there were worse ways to spend an afternoon than making small children happy. After a while Suzie and Megan, asleep in her buggy, came over to join him.

‘You miss him, don’t you?’

‘Who?’

He meant it; he had no idea what she was talking about. But Suzie smiled knowingly, and so Will, on the case again, smiled back.

‘I’ll see him later. It’s no big deal. He would have enjoyed it here, though.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Oh… Nice. He’s a really nice boy.’

‘I can imagine. Who does he look like?’

‘Ummm… Me, I guess. He drew the short straw.’

‘Oh, he could have done worse. Anyway, Megan looks just like Dan, and I hate it.’

Will looked at the sleeping child. ‘She’s beautiful.’

‘Yeah. That’s why I hate it. When I see her like this, I think, what a gorgeous baby, and then I think, you bastard, and then I think… I don’t know what I think. I get into a mess. You know, she’s a bastard, he’s gorgeous… You end up hating your own child and loving the man who dumped her.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Will. He was beginning to feel cheap and churned up. If the conversation was taking a mournful turn, it was time to make a move. ‘You’ll meet someone else.’

‘D’you reckon?’

‘Well. There’ll be lots of men… I mean, you know, you’re a very… You know. I mean, you’ve met me, and I know I don’t count, but… You know, there are plenty…’ He trailed off hopefully. If she didn’t bite, forget it.

‘Why don’t you count?’

Bingo.

‘Because… I don’t know…’

Suddenly Marcus was in front of them, hopping from foot to foot as if he were about to wet himself.

‘I think I’ve killed a duck,’ he said.

Nine

Marcus couldn’t believe it. Dead. A dead duck. OK, he’d been trying to hit it on the head with a piece of sandwich, but he tried to do all sorts of things, and none of them had ever happened before. He’d tried to get the highest score on the Stargazer machine in the kebab shop on Hornsey Road—nothing. He’d tried to read Nicky’s thoughts by staring at the back of his head every maths lesson for a week—nothing. It really annoyed him that the only thing he’d ever achieved through trying was something he hadn’t really wanted to do that much in the first place. And anyway, since when did hitting a bird with a sandwich ever kill it? Kids must spend half their lives throwing things at the ducks in Regent’s Park. How come he managed to pick a duck that pathetic? There must have been something wrong with it. It was probably just about to die from a heart attack or something; it was just a coincidence. But if it was, nobody would believe him. If there were any witnesses, they’d only have seen the bread hit the duck right on the back of the head, and then seen it keel over. They’d put two and two together and make five, and he’d be imprisoned for a crime he never committed.

Will, Suzie, Megan and Marcus stood on the path at the edge of the lake, staring at the dead body floating in the water.

‘There’s nothing we can do about it now,’ said Will, the trendy bloke who was trying to get off with Suzie. ‘Just leave it. What’s the problem?’

‘Well… Supposing someone saw me?’

‘D’you think anyone did?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe they said they were going to tell the park-keeper.’

‘Maybe someone saw you, or definitely? Maybe they said they were going to get the park-keeper, or definitely?’ Marcus didn’t like this bloke, so he didn’t answer him.

‘What’s that floating next to it?’ Will asked. ‘Is that the bread you threw at it?’

Marcus nodded unhappily.

‘That’s not a sandwich, that’s a bloody french loaf. No wonder it keeled over. That would have killed me.’

‘Oh, Marcus,’ Suzie sighed. ‘What were you playing at?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, it looks like it,’ said Will. Marcus hated him even more. Who did this Will think he was?’

‘I’m not sure it was me.’ He was going to test out his theory. If Suzie didn’t believe him, there was no chance the police and judges would.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I think it must have been ill. I think it was going to die anyway.’ Nobody said anything; Will shook his head angrily. Marcus decided this line of defence was a waste of time, even though it was true.

They were staring so hard at the scene of the crime that they didn’t notice the park-keeper until he was standing right next to them. Marcus felt his insides turn to mush. This was it.

‘One of your ducks has died,’ said Will. He made it sound as if it were the saddest thing he’d ever seen. Marcus looked up at him; maybe he didn’t hate him after all.

‘I was told that you had something to do with it,’ said the park-keeper. ‘You know that’s a criminal offence, don’t you?’

‘You were told that I had something to do with it?’ said Will. ‘Me?’

‘Maybe not you, but your lad here.’

‘You’re suggesting that Marcus killed this duck? Marcus loves ducks, don’t you, Marcus?’

‘Yeah. They’re my favourite animal. Well, second favourite. After dolphins. They’re definitely my favourite bird, though.’ This was rubbish, because he hated all animals, but he thought it helped.

‘I was told he was throwing bloody great french loaves at it.’

‘He was, but I’ve stopped him now. Boys will be boys,’ said Will. Marcus hated him again. He might have known he’d grass him up.

‘So he killed it?’

‘Oh, God no. Sorry, I see what you mean. No, he was throwing bread at the body. I think he was trying to sink it, because Megan here was getting upset.’

The park-keeper looked at the sleeping form in the buggy.

‘She doesn’t look very upset now.’

‘No. She cried herself to sleep, poor love.’

There was a silence. Marcus could see that this was the crucial time; the attendant could either accuse them all of lying, and call the police or something, or forget all about it.

‘I’ll have to wade in and get it,’ he said. They were in the clear. Marcus wasn’t going to jail for a crime he probably—OK, possibly—didn’t commit.

‘I hope there’s not some sort of epidemic,’ said Will sympathetically, as they started to walk back towards the others.

It was then that Marcus saw—or thought he saw—his mum. She was standing in front of them, blocking the path, and she was smiling. He waved and turned around to tell Suzie that she’d turned up, but when he looked back his mum wasn’t there. He felt stupid and didn’t say anything about it to anyone, ever.

Marcus was never able to work out why Suzie had insisted on coming back to the flat with him. He’d been out with her before, and she’d just dropped him off outside, waited until he’d let himself in and then driven off. But that day she parked the car, lifted Megan out in her car seat, and came in with him. She was never able to explain why she had done it.

Will wasn’t invited, but he followed them in, and Marcus didn’t tell him not to. Everything about that two minutes was mysteriously memorable, even at the time, somehow: climbing the stairs, the cooking smells that got trapped in the hall, the way he noticed the pattern on the carpet for the first time ever. Afterwards he thought he could recall being nervous, too, but he must have made that up, because there wasn’t anything to be nervous about. Then he put the key in the door and opened it, and a new part of his life began, bang, without any warning at all.

His mum was half on and half off the sofa: her head was lolling towards the floor. She was white, and there was a pool of sick on the carpet, but there wasn’t much on her—either she’d had the sense to puke away from herself, or she’d just been lucky. In the hospital they told him it was a miracle she hadn’t choked on her own vomit and killed herself. The sick was grey and lumpy, and the room stank.

He couldn’t speak. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t cry either. It was much too serious for that. So he just stood there. But Suzie dropped the car seat and ran over to her and started screaming at her and slapping her. Suzie must have seen the empty pill bottle as soon as she walked in, but Marcus didn’t spot it until later, when the ambulancemen came, so at first he was just confused; he couldn’t understand why Suzie was so mad at someone who was not very well.

Suzie yelled at Will to call for an ambulance and told Marcus to make some black coffee; his mum was moving now and making a terrible moaning noise that he had never heard before and never wanted to hear again. Suzie was crying, and then Megan started up too, so in seconds the room had gone from a terrifying silence and stillness to noisy, terrifying panic.

‘Fiona! How could you do this?’ Suzie screamed. ‘You’ve got a kid. How could you do this?’